3. ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR APPLICATIONS: SAMPLE GRANT PROPOSAL FOR DISSERTATION FIELDWORK (PART 1)

The third installment of this series is about grant proposals for dissertation fieldwork. All grad students who work on Vietnam will eventually have to travel there for research and it’s often the highlight of the grad school experience. But overseas research is expensive, and most students must apply for grants to fund their fieldwork or supplement their existing funding. In the US, fieldwork typically starts after the comprehensive exam (also known as the oral exam or the qualifying exam), which takes place at the end of the third year of a joint MA/Phd program or the second year of a direct Phd program. That means that students have to study for the most important exam of their career while also churning out applications to pay for their fieldwork. For most grad students, it’s also their first time writing a grant proposal. And all this is just as stressful as it sounds.

A grant proposal is somewhat similar to a personal statement but with greater depth. An excellent proposal should articulate a dissertation topic and explain how it will contribute to the field. It should also demonstrate that the topic is viable by discussing the availability of sources. Lastly, the proposal should show that the applicant is qualified and prepared to conduct the research. The writing should be clear and explanatory enough to appeal to an academic outside of one’s own field, and jargon should be avoided.

Like so many other application materials, grant proposals benefit from useful models, critical feedback, and numerous revisions. I remember asking more senior grad students if I could read their successful proposals, and they kindly shared their applications with me. I found it tremendously helpful to know what a successful grant proposal looked like. I was also part of a cohort of classmates who were all working on proposals, and I participated in two different writing groups focused on grant applications. One group consisted of classmates in Vietnam studies who could assess the significance of my research topic, the appropriateness of my sources, and my engagement with the existing scholarship. The other group included just me and a classmate in French history, and we could tell each other whether our proposals made sense to someone outside of our area of study. Additionally, my dissertation adviser read multiple drafts and gave me the sharpest (and most needed) feedback of all. I think I asked a few of my other professors to read it too. I no longer remember how many drafts I went through, but I do remember that I completely rewrote it at least once after my adviser looked it over.

I applied to six grants that year, but of course, I didn’t write six completely different applications. I drafted a master version and tailored it to each grant. In the end, I received two grants: the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program and the (now discontinued) Mellon Dissertation Fellowships in the Humanities in Original Sources, administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources and known as the Mellon-CLIR. In fact, every member of both writing groups won a grant, so we all benefitted from each other’s feedback even though we were often competing for the same grants.

Grant proposals can be quite long, so I will share my old proposals over two blog posts. Below is the proposal for the Fulbright-Hays. The Fulbright-Hays favors international cooperation, and I tailored my application by including a short section about sharing my work with Vietnamese academics. As with all of my old application materials, these proposals reflect my research interests and the scholarly debates at the time, not my current work. (Readers may notice that my grant proposal expands on the topic that I wrote in my personal statement when I applied to grad school. Many – perhaps even most – students change their intended dissertation topic during their first few years of grad school, so I’m unusually stubborn in sticking to the same topic.)

SAMPLE GRANT PROPOSAL FOR THE FULBRIGHT-HAYS

Project Description: Research Aims, Methods, and Sources

I am requesting a grant to conduct dissertation research in Vietnam.  My project examines the origins, evolution, and character of national identity in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, 1954-1975) and the significance of Republican nationalism in postcolonial Vietnamese history. Conventional scholarly wisdom assumes that the RVN lacked a strong sense of nationalism in contrast to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV),¹ but my preliminary research demonstrates the presence of a relatively dynamic national culture in the Republic and suggests its central importance to understanding the Vietnam War and modern Vietnamese history. I will focus on three important aspects of post-independence Republican nationalism: its relationship to colonial-era Vietnamese nationalism, its rivalry with DRV nationalism and Vietnamese communism, and its complex engagement with American intervention. By challenging scholarly characterizations of the RVN as a deviant political entity that evolved untouched by the greater development of modern Vietnamese nationalism, my project seeks to contribute to modern Vietnamese history, Vietnam War scholarship, and the theoretical literature on nationalism.

Post-independence Republican nationalism developed from colonial-era Vietnamese nationalism, but the Saigon regime and its population enhanced and suppressed particular continuities and discontinuities for political purposes. In contrast to conventional assumptions that the RVN lacked national identity, some limited scholarship suggests that the Republic represented a noncommunist alternative form of Vietnamese nationalism dating back to the colonial period. Tracing different strands of artistic and intellectual development, Neil Jamieson argues that the individualistic, effusively emotional literary trend that began in 1930s Hanoi continued and intensified in 1960s Saigon.² Influential interwar novels that, according to Hue-Tam Ho Tai, represented colonial progressivism, were considered national literary masterpieces in the Republic and enshrined in the public education curriculum.³ Archival sources show that the RVN Ministry of Education distributed scholarly classics written by colonial thinkers as academic prizes for the country’s most promising students.⁴ Thus, the regime attempted to teach its young generation an intellectual genealogy that made their nation-state the heir to colonial-era nationalism and intellectual activity.

The relationship between Republican nationalism and its communist counterpart was antagonistic since the RVN was established as the political rival to the Vietnamese communist movement and the DRV state. Recently, scholars interested in the Ngo Dinh Diem presidency have explored the regime’s promotion of Personalism as an ideological alternative to communism.⁵ In my preliminary archival work, RVN government officials routinely justified their demands for educational improvement and the restoration of national culture by criticizing the damage communism had caused to Vietnamese tradition and advocated their reforms as an ideological weapon to combat the political enemy.⁶

But it remains unclear how the population responded to anti-DRV state nationalism and how they conceived of the southern national community in relation to its ethnically identical communist rivals. The American presence represented a potential threat to RVN nationalism because it could undermine the country’s nationalist credentials, particularly after the introduction of American ground troops in 1965. The RVN state and pro-Saigon population had to find new ways to affirm their national identity without rejecting foreign assistance, while those opposed to American intervention sought to mobilize Vietnamese nationalism against foreign domination. In Hai muoi nam van hoc Mien Nam, 1954-1975 (Twenty Years of South Vietnamese Literature, 1954-1975), RVN writer Vo Phien argues that the Vietnamese perceived the American presence as a threat to their cultural identity; in response to the foreign dominance, a new trend of nativist, nationalist scholarship emerged, which he terms ve nguon, or returning to the source.⁷ Similarly, in my recently published article, I argue that the American presence prompted many Vietnamese to highlight cultural differences between themselves and their foreign allies and to define their identity in relation to an antique Vietnamese past and traditional Vietnamese womanhood.⁸

To understand the development of Republican nationalism, I will examine nationalist discourse as a dialogue between state and non-state actors; my method will be comparative. How did the regime promote national identity through public education, government-controlled media, propaganda, and official cultural policy? How did the nationalist discourse produced by non-state actors differ from state nationalism? Was the state-society dialogue characterized by reciprocal confirmation, contestation, competition, or antagonism? Sources for state nationalism include textbooks, curriculum guides, official press releases from Vietnam Presse, state-issued publications, and government documents, especially those from the Office of Cultural Affairs and the Ministries of Information and National Education (later the Ministry of Culture, Education, and Youth). Sources for non-state nationalism include major newspapers, mainstream and academic periodicals, influential literary and scholarly works, official publications of private organizations, popular music, movies, and memoirs. In comparing the nationalist messages in state and non-state sources, I will look for patterns, turning points, and common themes that arise in the evolving dialogue on national identity. My near-native fluency in Vietnamese and background in modern Vietnamese literature and colonial-era scholarly classics have prepared me well for analyzing Republican nationalist discourse.

Contribution to Scholarship

My project aims to contribute to the historiography on Vietnam by treating the RVN as a distinct unit of analysis located within longer trends of modern Vietnamese history. The dominant narrative, constructed by scholars such as David Marr,argues that the anticolonial, nationalist project led directly, exclusively, and inevitably to the DRV state.⁹ Conflating specifically DRV nationalism with Vietnamese nationalism, this communist teleology fails to explore the RVN’s colonial roots and figures it as a political deviation from the dominant trend of Vietnamese history. By examining the RVN’s relationship with colonial-era nationalism, my project follows the model of alternative nationalism suggested by Jamieson and others to reevaluate the RVN’s place within modern Vietnamese history. I anticipate that the supposedly deviant RVN will fit awkwardly within the historical developments that most scholars have considered the dominant developments. Thus, undermining RVN exceptionalism will revise not only the DRV-centered narrative but also scholarly interpretations of what constitutes the most central trends in modern Vietnamese history.

Besides Vietnamese history, my project will contribute to the scholarship of the Vietnam War. Focused on international, military, and political developments, the conventional war scholarship dismisses the RVN as an illegitimate American puppet and a dysfunctional, inauthentic pseudo-state.¹⁰ But these assertions are not grounded in empirical scholarship on the RVN’s domestic politics, civil society, intellectual activities, and popular political culture. Only recently have Americanist historians devoted more attention to the Republic; their work returns agency to Vietnamese actors and assigns equal causality to American and internal RVN developments. Focusing on Vietnamese-American relations, Philip Catton, Edward Miller, and Matthew Masur have argued that Ngo Dinh Diem’s government developed and pursued a vision of modernizing the RVN independent of American influence.¹¹ My research will extend their arguments by examining the post-Diem period in addition to Diem’s presidency and contextualizing Republican nationalism within a domestic intellectual genealogy and contemporary social environment. Moving beyond their scholarship, I will more forcefully interrogate the assumption that the population lacked a strong sense of identification with the southern nation-state by concentrating on Republican identity construction. The focus on domestic history will enable scholars to finally address seriously the unstudied of issues of RVN authenticity and legitimacy.

Besides increasing scholarly understanding of the RVN as a distinct political entity, the study of Republican nationalism promises to fundamentally revise scholarly understanding of the Vietnam War.  Conventional accounts hold that the communist victory can, to some extent, be attributed to the strength of nationalist sentiment in the DRV and the absence or weakness of nationalism in the RVN. Scholars have argued that the communist movement exclusively embodied contemporary nationalist sentiment and was the heir to a traditional anticolonial nationalism dating back to the late nineteenth century or earlier.¹² These explanations are inadequate because they ignore competing national identities. If the Republic represented an alternative nationalism, then more precise explanations are needed to account for the DRV’s victory. What specific characteristics of RVN and DRV nationalism help explain the outcome of the Vietnam War? How did North Vietnamese constructions of nationalism differ from Republican policies? If both were nationalistic, how important was nationalism as a factor in the DRV’s defeat of the RVN? Do factors other than nationalism hold more explanatory power? Framed as a war between competing Vietnamese nationalisms rather than capitalist Washington and communist Hanoi, an RVN-centered interpretation reveals the inadequacy of the accepted “nationalism arguments” and necessitates the search for entirely different explanations for the evolution and outcome of the Vietnam War.

Lastly, research on the RVN will contribute to the general scholarship on nationalism by furthering scholarly understanding of the relationship between nationalism and foreign domination. Scholars have argued that non-Western nationalisms trace their origins to contact with the West.¹³ In the case of the colonial Philippines, Vicente Rafael contends that the translation of the colonizer’s language, ideas, and culture actually enabled nationalism. Simultaneously accepting and rejecting elements of colonialism, Philippine nationalism mediated a force that was both alien and intimate.¹⁴ If colonialism both enables and threatens colonial nationalism, as Rafael believes, what is the relationship between foreign domination and post-independence nationalism? How do early nationalist states acknowledge the existence of a foreign patron while claiming nationalist legitimacy? The RVN is a particularly appropriate case study because post-independence contradictions were especially stark in the Republic’s politically and ethnically incongruent situation; Republican nationalist discourse was affected by the presence of a foreign political ally, the Americans, and the existence of an ethnically identical political rival, the DRV. My research promises to suggest news ways of conceptualizing nationalism by furthering our understanding of how autonomous identities within nationalist discourses can be constructed to accommodate foreign domination.

I will ground my research in the literature on the cultural construction of nationalism. Benedict Anderson argues that print capitalism, new communication technology, and the circulation of symbols and symbolic objects such as maps and flags helped give rise to a national “imagined community.”¹⁵ Mosse finds that national monuments, public festivals, and the commemorative practices of social and political organizations in modern Europe created a “secular liturgy” based on myths and symbols; this secular liturgy acted to incorporate the masses into the nation through what he considers a nationalist religion.¹⁶ Drawing on Anderson’s more popular “imagined community” and Mosse’s state-promulgated “secular liturgy,” my project will trace how nationalism was constructed and contested within state-society relations. In its two decades of existence, the Republic witnessed a dramatic expansion of the reading public, increased importance of print media, and popularization of radio and television—all factors favorable to the emergence of a public sphere.¹⁷ How did the newly created public sphere transform the imagined community created in the colonial era and respond to the regime’s nationalist liturgy? To what degree do state-society distinctions remain useful given government censorship and the common class background of state and non-state producers of nationalist discourse? RVN nationalist discourse is an especially suitable for examining cultural constructions of nationalism because the severe tensions between state and society there promises unusually distinct articulations from both sides of dialogue.

Preliminary Research, Justification for Overseas Research, and Research Plan

My preliminary research examines nationalist responses to American intervention. In my first seminar paper, I analyze the anti-American children’s novel, Giac O-ke (The Okay Invaders), in which the author commands young readers to emulate Vietnamese historical heroes instead of worshipping American superheroes and to demonstrate to Americans their patriotism through proper conduct and model citizenship. My recent article, published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, explores identity constructions within the discourse on the American presence in the prominent Saigon newspaper, Chinh Luan (Political Discussion), from 1965-1969. I found that the encounter with Americans prompted Vietnamese writers to define their identity using the past and the image of the proper Vietnamese womanhood and delineate boundaries to group membership. These constructions of identity represent certain continuities with the colonial era but were clearly modified by the dialogical relationship between the two unequal allies.¹⁸

In summer 2006, I conducted pre-dissertation research in Ho Chi Minh City. I undertook independent readings of colonial-era scholarly classics at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) and examined archival sources on public education and cultural policy at the National Archives Center II (NACII). I discovered that the documents most relevant to state nationalism were found in the Office of the RVN President Collection, Office of the Prime Minister Collection, and the various collections from the Ministry of Culture, Education, and Youth.¹⁹ To determine the availability of published sources, I surveyed published materials at the General Sciences Library (GSL) and used bookstores and compared them with the collections at the Library of Congress and Cornell University, the best library in North America for Vietnam studies.  In sum, I have familiarized myself with the secondary scholarship on the RVN, acquired a background in the colonial-era intellectual foundations of Republican nationalism, and worked with the document collections that will form the archival basis of my research.

This pre-dissertation research confirmed that my project requires going to Vietnam. RVN government documents are housed at the NACII. The GSL, formerly the RVN’s National Library, holds the world’s largest collection of South Vietnamese publications.²⁰ Although there is considerable overlap between the GSL’s holdings and Cornell University’s Asia Collections, the GSL’s unique strengths are its periodical collections from the late 1950s and early 1960s and theses and other research monographs written by Republican students and scholars. To avoid duplicating research in Vietnam that could easily be conducted in the United States, I will spend summer 2007 studying published print materials at Cornell. If necessary, I may take short trips to Washington, DC, to use the Library of Congress. Preliminary work at Cornell will allow me to start my research immediately upon arrival in Ho Chi Minh City and maximize the availability of sources found exclusively in Vietnam. I plan to return to Ho Chi Minh City in late summer 2007 for twelve months of dissertation research. I will divide my time between the NACII and the GSL examining archival and published sources regarding state and non-state perspectives. If deemed appropriate, I may take short-term independent readings at the USSH or elsewhere to deepen my background in colonial-era nationalist thought.

Guidance and Affiliation

Many scholars at Berkeley and in Ho Chi Minh City have provided and will continue to provide guidance and assistance for my project. At Berkeley, my dissertation advisor, [name of professor], will provide intellectual support for the completion of my research and has also been helpful in introducing me to his contacts, both Vietnamese and American. [Name of professor] has balanced my Vietnam focus with a wider Southeast Asian perspective, and [name of professor] will help me place Vietnamese nationalism within the greater framework of theories on nationalism. [Name of professor], [name of professor], and [name of professor]have helped me with the American side of the story, and [name of professor]has offered invaluable insights into South Vietnamese literature. The University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City has sent me a letter of affiliation to demonstrate their willingness to sponsor my research and provide access to research facilities. It was my previous affiliation with them that allowed me to work at the GSL and NACII in summer 2006. Furthermore, during the last two summers, I have taken classes on Vietnamese language, literature, and history at the USSH. There, [name of professor] and [name of professor] shared their knowledge of colonial-era scholarly classics. I plan to continue working with [name of professor], [name of professor], and other scholars during my research.

Sharing Dissertation with Vietnamese Scholars

I plan to discuss my research with [name of professor], [name of professor], and other Vietnamese scholars in Ho Chi Minh City, where I have formed relationships with both the USSH and the University of Pedagogy. I look forward to being part of a local community of scholars and hope that intellectual discussions with my many Vietnamese contacts will inform my research in the archives. I will make available my dissertation and all published materials to interested Vietnamese academics and officials.

THE FEEDBACK I WOULD GIVE MYSELF

After finishing the dissertation, I realized I should have focused ONE of these aspects and do comparative work on the RVN and DRV to highlight their differences. The reason is because the RVN wasn’t as forthrightly ideological as the DRV, and it’s often hard to point out anything distinctive about South Vietnamese nationalism other than Vietnamese ethnic pride. A comparative project would have required research in Hanoi as well, and a successful version of this imaginary project might be akin to the approach taken in Olga Dror’s excellent Making Two Vietnams. After I landed my position at UConn, I scrapped the idea of a comparative project because I had never conducted research in Hanoi and wasn’t confident I would find enough materials there. I no longer have any plans to pursue that project. But dear reader, if you are a grad student in search of a dissertation topic, I think a comparative project about some aspect of culture and society in the two Vietnams would make for a great book!

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1. Variations of this argument can be found in David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971); Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925-1945 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982);George McT. Kahin, Intervention (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987); George Herring, America’s Longest War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (New York: Pantheon, 1985). ↩︎
2. Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). ↩︎
3. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). ↩︎
4. “Ho so ve viec tang phan thuong cho hoc sinh vao dip cuoi nien hoc nam 1956-1963” [Records concerning the distribution of prizes to students at the end of the academic year, 1956-1963], Folder 17982, Office of the RVN President Collections (First Republic), National Archives Center II (hereafter NACII). ↩︎
5. Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 25-50. ↩︎
6. See for example “Kien-nghi cua Hoi Dong Quoc Gia ve viec chan hung van hoa” [Resolution of the National Committee concerning cultural restoration], 15 Dec 1954, Folder 29111, Office of the Prime Minister Collection, NACII; Letter, Secretary of Reform Nguyen Duc Thuan to the Primer Minister, 5 Jan 1955, Folder 29186, Office of the Prime Minister Collection, NACII; Representative Nguyen Thieu, “Quan niem ve giao duc duoi chinh the cong hoa hien tai” [Educational concepts under the present republican regime], Vietnam Presse Release 2145, 14 Jan 1957 (afternoon), Office of the RVN President Collection (First Republic), NACII. ↩︎
7. Võ Phiến, Hai mươi năm văn học Miền Nam, 1954-1975 [Twenty Years of South Vietnamese Literature, 1954-1975] (Westminster, Cal.: Văn Nghệ, 1986). ↩︎
8. Nu-Anh Tran, “South Vietnamese Identity, American Intervention and the Newspaper Chinh Luan [Political Discussion], 1965-1969,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1-2 (February/August 2006): 169-209. ↩︎
9. David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981);Huynh, Vietnamese Communism. ↩︎
10. Kahin, Intervention; Frederik Logevall, Choosing War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1976); Young, Vietnam Wars; Kolko, Anatomy of a War. ↩︎
11. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure; Edward Miller, “Grand Designs: Vision, Power, and Nation-Building in America’s Alliance with Ngo Dinh Diem, 1954-1960” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004); Matthew Masur, “Hearts and Minds: Cultural Nation-Building in South Vietnam, 1954-1963” (PhD diss., Ohio State Universiy, 2004). ↩︎
12. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism; Huynh, Vietnamese Communism; Kahin, Intervention; Herring, America’s Longest War; Young, The Vietnam Wars; Kolko, Anatomy of a War. ↩︎
13. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). ↩︎
14. Vicente Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). ↩︎
15. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed.(London and New York: Verso, 1991). ↩︎
16. George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). ↩︎
17. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam, 277, 292. ↩︎
18. See note 8. ↩︎
19. Collections from other RVN ministries are not currently available, as the NACII is in the process of a major re-indexing project. ↩︎
20. Edward Miller and Matthew Masur, “Saigon Revisited” (unpublished article, 2006). ↩︎